In an annual review of the most pressing issues for health executives and policy makers, PwC identified nine top issues for 2009:

The economic downturn will hit healthcare

The underinsured will surpass the uninsured as healthcare’s biggest headache

Big pharma turns to M&A to build the drug pipeline

From vaccines to regulation, prevention is on the rise

Genetic testing reaching a price point for the masses

The Internet and social networking is a powerful health extended “Technology will empower patients in new ways during 2009. The increased information and growing patient-to-patient interaction over social networking platforms and websites such as patientslikeme.com and americanwell.com are changing how healthcare is navigated and experienced by consumers, especially as electronic health records become more common.”

ReadWriteWeb included PatientsLikeMe, a CommerceNet portfolio company, in their list of top “real world apps that have made our offline lives easier in 2008.”

“PatientsLikeMe is an online community for people with life-changing medical conditions like multiple sclerosis, post-traumatic stress disorder, or fibromyalgia. Even though the site is still relatively new, it already provides one of the largest patient communities, and also features a wide range of research tools for symptoms and treatments.

“PatientsLikeMe was founded in 2004 and defines its mission as providing a platform for sharing real world medical data. Members of the site often share data about their individual health experiences like symptoms, weight, mood swings, or drugs they have taken. Thanks to this, you can easily find others who are in the same situation as you and what treatments are working for them.”

On December 8, Vivaty, a CommerceNet portfolio company, launched Vivaty Points, a way to start earning points for all the events and activities that users do when in Vivaty, such as sending gifts. Points is the first in a long series of upcoming features and building blocks for the virtual economy.

Abstract: Breaking Down Barriers to Collaboration–The Health Commons InitiativeImagine a virtual marketplace or ecosystem where participants share data, knowledge, materials and services to accelerate research. The components might include databases on the results of chemical assays, toxicity screens, and clinical trials; libraries of drugs and chemical compounds; repositories of biological materials (tissue samples, cell lines, molecules), computational models predicting drug efficacies or side effects, and contract services for high-throughput genomics and proteomics, combinatorial drug screening, animal testing, biostatistics, and more. The resources offered through the Commons might not necessarily be free, though many could be. However, all would be available under standard pre-negotiated terms and conditions and with standardized data formats that eliminate the debilitating delays, legal wrangling and technical incompatibilities that frustrate scientific collaboration today.

We envision a Commons where a researcher will be able to order everything needed to replicate a published experiment as easily as ordering DVDs from Amazon. A Commons where one can create a workflow to exploit replicated results on an industrial scale–searching the world’s biological repositories for relevant materials; routing them to the best labs for molecular profiling; forwarding the data to a team of bioinfomaticians for collaborative analysis of potential drug targets; and finally hiring top service providers to run drug screens against those targets; with everything–knowledge, data, and materials–moving smoothly from one provider to the next, monitored and tracked with Fed-Ex precision; where the workflow scripts themselves can become part of the Commons, for others to reuse and improve. Health Commons’ marketplace will slash the time, cost, and risk of developing treatments for diseases. Individual researchers, institutions, and companies will be able to publish information about their expertise and resources so that others in the community can readily discover and use them. Core competencies, from clinical trial design to molecular profiling, will be packaged as turnkey services and made available over the Net. The Commons will serve as the public-domain, non-profit hub, with third-parties providing value added services that facilitate information access, communication, and collaboration.

A new immersive web platform called Vivaty Scenes lets users create tiny virtual worlds and decorate them with content from around the Internet.

After adding Vivaty Scenes, which entered public beta Tuesday, to a Facebook or AOL Instant Messenger account, users can set up a customizable “room” where they can host chat sessions or small virtual gatherings within a web browser.

We are offering a couple internship positions at CommerceNet this summer.

CommerceNet is an entrepreneurial research institute, dedicated to fulfill the promise of the Internet. We are currently seeking Software Engineer interns to implement a data visualization Web application for public health information. Involves JavaScript and Python, both data access and graphics. CommerceNet may also accept proposals for internships to work on well-specified projects of the intern’s own design.

What you’ll do

Develop open source libraries or widgets for graphing and data visualization

Build public service, community oriented Web site

Be part of a small team or work nearly independently

Develop with minimal guidance, using rapid iteration and feedback loop and with leeway in choices of tools.

Borrow, create or collaborate on visual design and visual elements

Required Skills:

Web Applications development, including CSS and JavaScript

Python or demonstrated ability to pick up languages

MySQL or similar data management experience

Great ability to extrapolate from raw ideas to realistic implementations.

A goal of many new Web “2.0” ventures is to build a large or at least persistent community. Success is difficult to measure, but breaking into the top 100,000 sites by traffic measured by Alexa is one goal. It might be a good sign if the site designers send emails to a few people asking them to take a look at the site and after only two days over 3000 people sign up to beta test. You could do worse than to have a list of 60,000 people desperate to join your site before it leaves beta — so desperate that the site admins put a “waiting list checker” page up just so that an impatient person can see how many people are in line to get accounts before he or she does. continue reading »